skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you agree with the notion that government intervention to get an edge in strategic industries can be a good idea, it looks like a good loan at whatever rate they got (assuming it's higher than a 1/8 of a percent, the gov't turns a profit, too).

I agree with this notion. Why not use whatever resources available to gain a competitive edge?
Small companies in poor countries
The Simple Secret to Ruling The World...Someday
Curiosity does use a nuclear power source (an RTG) but it only provides a little over 100 Watts of power. As I said, the primary use of the RTG is not to drive the rover but to power the batteries over night to drive the rover during the day. Even so, this still amounts to less than one horsepower available to drive a nearly one tonne vehicle.
We actually went that route with historical data and it wasn't any good to be honest. Work patterns change daily, so we really need the auto scaling.

Working with Historical data means you either totally oversubscribe certain days, or totally underdo it. It has to be automated due to the latest load.
The black-body temperature of the background radiation of the universe is about 3K. That means achieving a lower temperature requires an active heat pump.
Did you consider Reserved Instances?
I'm 60 and have been programming for 44 years. This year I'm working on election maps for Google. I still like learning new languages - this year it's PostgreSQL and PostGIS, Go, Autohotkey (a very strange language!), and now TypeScript (not quite a new language).

One thing I get an odd pleasure out of is when other programmers use phrases and styles I came up with years ago. A recent example is the $ prefix on a JavaScript variable containing a jQuery object:

// Set $test to a jQuery object and test to the DOM object
var $test = $('#test'), test = $test[0];

I just saw someone explaining that on reddit last night and it gave me a smile.

Much longer ago, I coined the phrase "fire an event" back in the 80's when I was designing the VBX interface for Visual Basic (then called Ruby). Alas, not all the names I coined for that project survived: VB Controls were originally called Gizmos, which I thought was a much more fun name. But still it's neat to see people talk about firing an event.
> Why do I get prompted to enter a commit message when I'm just doing a git pull?

This shouldn't happen; you need to rethink how you're set up.

> Why do I have to explicitly add every file I want to commit each time? Why can't it just default to "everything under the current dir" like svn does?

You can use git commit -a

Edit: by "rethink" I mean research why this is happening, because it isn't by design. I'm sure somebody can help, I just don't have the answer for you.
Really enjoying grid layout. I wish it was well supported. Makes so much more sense than what we have today.
Local leadgen is hard. They'll have to do a monumental job of generating buzz to keep this going. Traditional routes like buying keywords on AdWords are very competitive. "maid service new york" currently goes for $6.33 per click there... could take many clicks for a single booking.
As many others have pointed out, this is not really a matter of language but of the data types used. In IEEE 754 floating point arithmetic, the two expressions are not equal.

You're looking for a different data type, and many choices would give you the desired equality: a decimal floating point representation, calculating with rational numbers and interval arithmetic come to mind (technically, IEEE floating point is a kind of interval arithmetic, but you have not much control over the size of the intervals used and comparison does not do what you might naively expect, i.e., checking whether the two intervals intersect).

I suppose you should look for a library like GMP or MPIR for whatever is your preferred language. Most computer algebra systems (e.g., Sage) will also provide with what you need in some way or another.
Has anybody considered the idea of stealth teaching young kids rather than forcing them to memorize things? Imagine that instead of watching useless cartoons kids where playing games like this (robomind) and or dragon box. Maybe throw in some strategy games that tell accurate history of the world and some economy games. I just feel like this would be extremely effective in teaching younger minds.
It would be handy if there was a option to git-rebase that would print a warning if you were about to rebase a commit by someone other than $(git config user.email)
Any language which uses floating points to represent these values rather than fixed points.

C# and some versions of C use fixed-point representations for these values by default (or correct for floating point errors internally, as with C#), and return the correct answer of true, as .1 is equal to .1 in fixed-point representations.

EDIT: False is only the correct answer when using floating point representations, as the equation no longer boils down to .1 == .1, but something like .999 == 1.0001, etc.
Web-scale Arduino
Well, why should an RSS reader be a program be part of core Chrome, if a mail reader isn't? Google likes to push their cloud services after all. I use an addon that notifies me if there's an RSS feed on a page -- I can click on it to add the RSS to my Google Reader account.
How it Works: VMware’s Own Internal Self-Service Cloud
They probably have a dilution refrigerator. It's a pretty standard piece of equipment, and can achieve millikelvin level temperatures, far lower than the 3 Kelvin microwave background.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator

There are other, more sophisticated methods of cooling, which can go even lower in temperature.
I think author is switching cause and effect:

Move a few paragraphs around and the problem becomes clear. It is right in his article!

> Drupal just isn't a great system to code for.

And then

> No debugging your custom code

Proper, well architectured custom code is not hard to debug. At least not anywhere near as hard as debugging Drupalcode. Due to, yup "Drupal just isn't a great system to code for."

> No digging through the docs trying to find the API function you need for an odd task

"Drupal just isn't a great system to code for."

> A discoverable UI--click around until you find what you're looking for, rather than digging through code

Hmm. there is a pattern here: "Drupal just isn't a great system to code for."

> A team of thousands of users and contributors testing the code in ways you never would have imagined and fixing the bugs

Klicking Monkeys testing stuff? Where are the unit-tests? CI? They are there, somewhere in Drupal, but in reality unusable, because, yup "Drupal just isn't a great system to code for."

> A much much smaller risk of security breaches due to that team

Well, to an extend. But the most security comes from your arcitecture. And 90% of the Drupal-security-anouncements can be tracked back to, yup "Drupal just isn't a great system to code for.".

> Holy crap, so much faster

Yes. Faster then coding. But that is only true for Drupal, because, "Drupal just isn't a great system to code for.".
It certainly is not faster then your average RAD-framework for many, many sites. There may be some cases where Drupal is faster, but only when you don't have to write a line of code, nor need to debug and find why Module Foo and Bar don't work together, because.. well. See above.
It really depends on what you mean by "programming." Following some dullard's waterfall plan to put sludge data in one server into a database of sludge on some other server would make anyone depressed.

Writing books, consulting on multiple interesting projects, and being well-remunerated is a very rewarding way of making a living. Can't complain.
I like to use ihackernews.com
I think it depends on WHAT you're programming at 50. Anyway, my philosophy is that I want to be defined by what I'm doing away from my job/career. It is extremely depressing to me to think that my career will be my driving force through most of my life.
> Would it be overly conspiratorial to suggest that the CIA and NSA are in fact interested in a large-scale implementation of Shor's algorithm?

The only thing conspiratorial is that it wasn't mentioned in the article. Hmmmm.
A person I know added me a few days ago. Today I got around to accepting it...only she says she didn't add me and that FB must be looking at mutual friends and when that number is high enough (5-6), they sometimes create an add. She said she had heard of this happening to a few friends of hers, too.
there are other coutries in the world that are not the United States
I have to think that in that case it's the original lender that resurrects the loan, it just took a reminder. A vulture wouldn't buy a loan that was truly dead.

I guess you can blame vultures for incentivizing old lenders to resurrect loans but that's a pretty indirect thing to be upset about.
Good point, but I'm not really sure how to judge that. I've been getting paid for it for about 5 years, but that doesn't encompass all the stuff that I've built that other people have found useful, which is the metric that I care about. So, 8-ish, maybe?

Anyway, the point is that I don't have 33 years under my belt, so maybe I'm wrong about how I'll feel in the future, but based on the experience I do have, I just don't imagine it ever getting old.
It quickly becomes apparent that the author has no experience with NLP.

Still, I have mixed feelings regarding your comment. Firstly, the author shows a true hacker spirit by trying to use the computer to solve problems, on the other hand, the author shows great courage to publish his/her thoughts on the Internet.

I do not want to live in a world where people are afraid of publishing their research (as insignificant as it might be) because of other people calling it "a waste of time" or "useless and pointless".
>Not many people like you do

How do you know this? Any hard data you'd care to share?
Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids
A lot of students fall under the category of students which cannot even explain the final year project which they did.

Most Master's degree holders from other Indian universities cannot even solve FizzBuzz in a language of their choice. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
The Gig is a lie?
And certainly not always available due to those same perverse incentives.
You should check out Scratch too.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Why wouldn't people feel bad about scamming someone like this?

I envy your innocence.

Let my try to explain this with evolutionary algorithms. People have been running simulations of social life for many years. That's how we know that social contract "cheaters" naturally evolve. The same type of simulations have shown how "punishers" also evolve. And how complex group dynamics become long terms stable with all of these roles and then some.

Is there something in a culture (besides wealth discrepancy per se) that makes this sort of thing more OK?

No, this is universally true of humanity.
Is it really what "science" says if you don't cite your sources? Meh.

EDIT: typo
Nest's co-founder Matt Rogers interviewed by Kevin Rose
>I doubt it.

Everyone is pointing out that you're incorrect, but can I just ask why this particular line would have caused you to dismiss the whole article, even in the event you were right? It's such a pointless statement to get caught up on. This obviously isn't a research paper but there were some interesting ideas to us not familiar with the history of D-Wave. Why the dismissive attitude?
Every base is base 10. ;).
Even without those two references, it sounds demeaning.
Battery tech will not reach oil parity within the decade. Oil parity would be batteries with roughly 1/3 the energy density of oil (maybe 1/4 if you factor in the fact that electric motors are lighter than ICE motors).

Predictions are hard, but I'm going to go on the record (and am willing to wager) saying that the batteries in EVs produced in 2012 will have an energy density lower than 9MJ/L.

Ultimately that doesn't matter though. The ED in the Model S is already almost good enough, it's the cost that matters, and I think that will go down. If you end up having a car that is a bit bigger and a lot heavier than an equivalent ICE car would be, you can still sell it.
I found this article useful despite its errors. However, this article only reinforces my belief that it is easier to work with the HSL color notation. Young(Yello-60degree) Guys (Green-120) Can (Cyan-180) Be (Blue-240) Messy (Magenta-210) Rascals (Red-0/360) gives the visualization for hue. Saturation is between 0-100, where 0 is grayed out and 100 is full-hue. Lightness varies from 0-100, where 0 is blacked out, 100 is whited-out and 50 would give the color as-is.
I don't see a flaw in Malthus' argument (population grows exponentially, food production does not). The green revolution mostly pushed it back a couple of decades (except for people here and there who actually did starve to death) through modernizing worldwide agriculture and massive use of petroleum as fertilizer and pesticide, but it can't be repeated--oil probably already peaked and we don't have even more advanced farming techniques held in reserve. The incentives are right but they only help if some feasible solution exists; I'm not aware of any short of inventing nanotech or invent cold fusion (scaling fission is too slow because we have to mine all our fuel) or an extremely authoritarian yet effective sterilization campaign (which would make China's look like Disneyland).
So I'm relatively new to version control entirely, but in the last few years my group has been making a big push to institute Git. I have been wondering lately, however: how much history cleaning is expected/desirable?

When I develop, I split my commits into as many small changes as I can so that the commit messages are single topic. I thought that was basically the idea. Every once in a while I use rebase to combine a few commits that should have been done together as they all addressed the same issue. This all seems right to me. I am left with a clean history of everything I have done on a very fine grained time scale. But the large number of commits, each with little significance to whole program hides the large scale structure of the development.

However, I could use rebase to start combining loosely related commits, trading the time resolution for clarity in the commit history. There seems to be a continuum along this scale. Where is the proper place in that continuum to say this is clean enough? Also, I don't like making changes where I am losing perfectly good information.

I know that I can group certain commits by defining a branch, developing on it, then merging (non-fast-forward) back to the original. The branch should keep the grouping in the commit history. I even suppose that this is can be done after the fact using rebase with the proper amount of git-fu. Is branching and non-fast-forward merges the preferred method of grouping related commits in the history?

If so, this seems troubling as it means that partially fixing something is difficult to do with a clean history. Until the piece of the program you wish to fix is completely working, it shouldn't be merged into master because it would ruin the grouping of the related commits. This means that there can't be any partial thought's like fixing bugs as you find them, because presumably you might want to group all bug fixes of a function together, but have a distinct commit for each.

Now I'm more confused than when I started. Seriously, any references or advice on this sort of topic are welcome.
It's not as stupid as it seems. Due to the cosmic microwave background, the equilibrium temperature far from other natural radiation sources is about 3K. But, as we don't know the temperatures in the whole universe and there are natural processes that can cool things below their equilibrium temperature, they should have said "... anywhere in the known natural universe".
It was rare on the T61. There was a waiting list.
How Apple has changed under Tim Cook
I'm color-sighted but my son is color blind. I find that the easiest way to remember what colors differentiate well is to remember the orange/blue colors that Valve chose for Portal specifically because they have the greatest visual distinction for the greatest number of people.

It's also an easy shorthand, because many developers/designers know the game, so you can just say "you know, Portal colors"
This is a scam. The LED industry includes hundreds of players and thousands of products driving billions of dollars in annual revenues. If this patent was truly a problem, everyone in the LED industry would be all over this, as this would absolutely devastate the industry. There would be no need for a grassroots campaign.

Moreover, this website contains numerous factual inconsistencies and falsities, numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes, and looks like it was slapped together by a Nigerian scammer in about 5 minutes.

The only logical explanation for this "campaign" is that someone is taking advantage of the situation to scam money out of people.
I'm a huge fan of pandas (http://pandas.pydata.org/) for data analysis. It offers a lot of the basic functionality of R, but everything is in python. The original author of pandas, Wes McKinney, even wrote a book about it: Python for Data Analysis (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do).

One caveat I would mention about data analysis would be that statistics is not just number crunching. It is really a bit of an art to making sure you are looking at the right sample of data in the right way, and ensure you are accounting for all potential biases. Surprisingly, I have noticed as I've gotten more experience doing data analysis, it takes me longer to do and I make less confident assertions. But on the other hand, I now very rarely make assertions which were incorrect, which is extremely important. I believe that incorrect data analysis is significantly worse than no data analysis.

So, the advice I would give to people getting started is whenever you come to a conclusion by analyzing a particular piece of data, ask your "if I look at the data differently, can I come to the opposite conclusion?". You would be surprised how often the answer to this question is yes, and that is a good indicator that you a) need more data or b) cannot make a significant conclusion. This can be especially difficult when you are already sure you know the answer to a question even before you do the data analysis, but you really have to be disciplined about it.
This is great for people who are that organized. I'm not, so I like the 'just merge everything into master' mentality. See http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
On the example that's supposedly good, I can read, without putting in excessive effort (but trying some!) seven covers, or 1/5th of the total.

Of the comics, I can read every single one, and they all look pretty good to me.

I had to re-read this article several times to make sure he was actually praising the top image and criticizing the bottom image rather than the other way around.
Cultural technology and the making of K-pop
> But I'd prefer to keep that history, but rarely use or display it.

So why have it?

> I'm still new-ish to git and don't get why rebase is popular.

My most common use case for rebase is actually to keep my private branches up to date with master. `git rebase master` or `git fetch origin && git rebase origin/master` are common tools for me when I'm doing private work for an extended period of time. This way, I don't have a point where my private branch diverges from master; my changes are always fresh and based off the latest and greatest.
Yes. In 5 minutes, I have an email sign up form on a new WordPress install that delivers all the posts I make to all the subscribers via email.
Sound waves let us see light deep within organs
I've heard some of these words...
A story of economic displacement in one photo
This is what happens when you trust the cloud
Knowing the pricing for your industry is very, very important. Most consumers use price as a proxy for value, and perceive an expensive product as more valuable than a less expensive alternative.
Trying to work with color in RGB triplets is like trying to assemble furniture with a plastic fork. Any discussion of color for programmers needs to be in terms of HSL, with a discussion of Lab for completeness and RGB for dealing with legacy systems.
Is The Code Good?
See other comments regarding email delivery.
There are some places in the "natural universe" that are colder than the CMB. That's because they aren't in equilibrium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero#Very_low_temperat...
Show HN: Grace - graceful server restarting (not just web)
Facebook: The Making of 1 Billion Users
It's the learning new stuff that keeps it fun. (54)
I have to disagree with how critical you're being. Yes, proof-reading is highly important, but he's writing an article for rather untechnical people (that is the audience: people that don't understand hexadecimal representation of colors). There's no guarantee that these folks know base-16, that RGB means bytes representing each color in said order, or even how that maps to a monitor.

While the original article is somewhat misleading over why hexadecimal works the way it does, it's closer than you. The OP is trying to explain base-16 at the same time he's trying to describe basic RGB handling. Not everyone learns math in other bases at school (I didn't, I had to teach myself) so he had to cover it, and make use of familiar terms like "tens place".

On top of that, the explanation was presented in a highly visual way. There are a lot of visual learners who just don't get it when I try to explain just verbally, or just with the code.

The OP is right: the pound, or hash, sign is how the browser knows that the identifier is a hexadecimal sequence—just like compilers using 0xff00... to indicate hexadecimal numbers. #ff0000 is one hexadecimal number just like #ff000000 is. They aren't separate numbers, they just have different numbers of bits.

So what's going on here? Well, it's all about the bits, because 2 hexadecimal digits can express 0-255 or 1 byte. So this is actually a data structure of 3 bytes left-shifted into a single 32-bit integer.

#ff8060 (16744544) is the same as

// R G B
color = 255 << 16 | 128 << 8 | 96

Colors with an alpha channel shift all that over another 8 bits and then add an alpha channel. So RGBA(0,0,0,0.5) is equivalent to:

// R G B A
color = 0 << 24 | 0 << 16 | 0 << 8 | round(0.5 * 255)

In fact, this latter bit order is probably how the browser stores all the colors now that browsers allow for alpha channels in colors. Yeah, you can store this in a struct if you want (I remember Delphi let me encode a struct to/from a raw unsigned integer automatically by compiler optimization), but in the end this is how the raw color is encoded and sent to the the underlying renderer. Ask anyone that has dealt with OpenGL, DirectX, or anything close to the hardware.

So why are hexadecimals widely used in CSS? Because they represent the actual data structure in memory after all the fancy conversions, like HSL, are done.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I felt like writing up an explanation of this anyhow. Might be useful to someone that didn't understand the why.
Being smarter than everyone else is awesome while it lasts. Be sure to come back in 20 and let us know how your plans worked out.